I previously worked as a reporter for Business Daily, Kenya's largest business newspaper. Now I travel across Africa, helping FORBES track the richest people on the continent and telling their stories. I also chronicle the stories of successful African enterprises and the entrepreneurs behind them. Follow me on Twitter @MfonobongNsehe

A simple yet ingenious idea, M-Pesa (M for mobile, and Pesa-a Swahili word for money) lets users deposit, transfer and withdraw funds via text message. To send money, a subscriber goes to a registered M-Pesa agent with the money and the phone number of the recipient. For a fee of a little over $1, the agent sets up a virtual account for you, credits the account with the money, and then sends the amount to the recipient’s account. A subscriber can send money even to a recipient on a different mobile network, who can cash it at any M-Pesa agent simply by presenting an ID and entering a secret code. Today, M-Pesa has over 19,000 registered agents all across Kenya, and the service has 20 million subscribers.

M-Pesa is now arguably the most successful mobile phone‐based financial service in the world today, and the model is being adopted and studied by countries in Asia and other parts of Africa. You can read more about M-Pesa here.

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Who says Africa is not contributing ideas to the general advance of knowledge and well-beings of the world? Africans have been doing that all this while stealthily yet succinctly, except now and then stolen and claimed by others. Of course, one could think of more than these five wonderful ideas.

Hakuna matata, problems solved. I like this best. After all, what is there to worry? (vzc1943)

Maybe you should have thought about that before writing this garbage article. Hakuna Matata and Safari? I can’t believe Forbes allowed you to print this article. Then again what do they care if you’re painting an innacurate picture of Africa. You ought to be disappointed in yourself because this article is definitely going to to decrease your credibility as a writer. Complete nonsense

I’m excited you know how to read. If you properly read the top of the article, you’ll see that I selected at random innovations, ideas, concepts and phenomena that EMERGED from Africa, yet INSPIRED a revolution in technology, CULTURE, travel, entertainment etc. ‘Safari’ is African. It has INSPIRED many hundreds of thousands of Westerners to visit our beautiful continent, and experience all its beauty. It has inspired a revolution and trend in global travel. Whenever I meet people in Europe, they talk about their longing for a safari.

‘Hakuna Matata’ is an African concept, and everywhere in the world, people use the phrase to refer to a worry-free state. Everyone says ‘Hakuna Matata.’ It has inspired a culture of sorts. And that was what I was just looking to highlight.

Isabelledany, learn to read between the lines, and in the future aspire towards comprehension. You are being sentimental for no reason at all.

Its always great to see Africans putting us on the map globally. I guess most people, well in my opinion, never knew what Safari meant. Its surprising how we just use some words or terminology without knowing what it really means.

Mr. Nsehe. Well done, its by looking at what we can do to change the world that others get motivated and instill hope to our young minds that they can make it. Africa will only we realise that Knowledge is and remains the greatest treasure for any conscious individual and nation with an ambitious vision; it is the ultimate legacy of man’s existence on the planet Earth” “A few millennial ago, Africa were the first to enter the Agricultural Age, the first to build in stones and the first to pioneer in technology. Today, Africa is behind every continent in technology and as a result the poorest continent. Technological Knowledge can be used to create wealth and alleviate poverty in Africa.

Kwame Nkrumah said: “Socialism without science is void”

The lack of technological knowledge is the reason for the wide disparity between the rich and the poor nations today, because the rich nations are getting richer much faster than the poor nations due to investment in technological knowledge, the gap will continue to widen. This gap can be closed if African nations focus on developing an economy that is knowledge and technology based instead of one that is based on the export of natural resources.” Check this out http://www.thecald.com and http://www.thecald.org Personal observation, noticed 3 out of 5 mentioned can claim their origin from Kenya (Mpesa, Safari and Hakuna Matata)…..Suggestion, add Barak Obama too